Cartografía del uso del suelo en la subcuenca Huaquechula, Puebla, México, con un índice combinado de imágenes de satélite

The elaboration of updated land-use maps in irrigated agriculture regions is essential for the monitoring of production as well as for the application of hydrological ered to be the most up-to-date official map in Mexico. Maps were evaluated using confusion, omission and commission matrices, and overall user and producer reliability indices. The values obtained for confusion matrices indicate that the map produced from satellite images was better at delimiting land uses compared to the Inegi Map of Vegetation and Land Use, Series VI. For the irrigated agricultural land use, the primary delimitation objective, the map produced was 81.82% reliable for the user (probability of selecting a random point in one category that really belongs to that category) for irrigated land, versus 78.57% for the Series VI map. The produced map also yielded a higher reliability for the producer, relative to the reference map (84.38% vs. 61.11%, respectively), as well as less omission errors (18.18% versus 21.43%) and commission errors (15.63% versus 38.89%). We concluded that the map generated from Landsat 8 images using the RGB-NDVI index, provided a higher reliability than the map of Land Use and Vegetation, Series VI. For regions with high spatial and temporal complexity of crops, such as the study area, the procedure involving the RGB-NDVI index is an expeditious low-cost alternative for the continuous updating of land-use maps. The map obtained here is useful for monitoring changes in land use, and as an input for hydrological models, such as the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT), to estimate the effects of agricultural practices on surface streams.